


Light to Travel By (The Waves of Time Remix)

by lost_spook



Category: Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-13
Updated: 2014-04-13
Packaged: 2018-01-19 05:29:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1457407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lost_spook/pseuds/lost_spook
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When you're a time traveller, sometimes it's hard to tell if it's the past that haunts the present, or the future that haunts the past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Light to Travel By (The Waves of Time Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [livii](https://archiveofourown.org/users/livii/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Lodestar](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/44653) by Livii. 



> With many thanks to aralias (who, as the best kind of beta, pointed out that the beginning made no sense. I trust that it does now, but if not, all blame is obviously mine).

_There is power in the ordinary, power in the old._

*

Someone is watching him. 

He doesn’t understand what it is, the first time it happens. He’s busy trying to find a way to get back into an Aztec tomb, and keep himself and his companions alive. And, like all youth, he doesn’t believe in death, or not his own, not yet. 

He senses the movement in the extra dimensions, though: the way time shifts in the air about him. He fears it, can almost touch it, taste it. Time is no longer a certainty. Perhaps it never is, never was. Perhaps that’s another lie he lives by.

It could be Barbara’s meddling, of course, but he believes not. The ring on his finger burns for a moment, inexplicably. All he does know is that, whatever it is, whoever is there, by the time he has leisure to look, there’s nothing left to see.

Instead, he finds Cameca in the garden, and (scientist and explorer that he is) he examines the workings of the human heart in detail for the first (but not the last) time. It’s funny how something seems to crawl back into his still singular heart as he does. He’s loath to admit it, but it’s the same with Barbara and with Chatterton – _Chesterton_. It’s a gift he does not ask for, does not want, but at the same time, he knows even now it’s too precious to return unused.

 

*

 

It’s much later, back in the Ship, that he realises it wasn’t the first time, after all. He’s been observed before.

He felt that same tremor in the time stream, that same odd twinge in his ring finger on that November night; something aside from the London fog. It had been far fainter, and he’d dismissed it then as a passing ache in his bones, but now he’s certain it was the outermost ripples of something yet to come. The same someone watching him.

Susan wasn’t there again, and he’d worried, as he always did. He thought of flight, and of safety, and didn’t understand her fascination with that ridiculous school. He couldn’t see why she should cling to routine, to linear human life, or find such joy in the mundane. 

And yet, as he’d passed through that gate to the junkyard, he’d felt the strangest echo of feeling as if he did, or would one day (too late?).

Another Ship, he thinks. It must have been, but that’s not quite right. The TARDIS’s lights flicker as if in protest. “Yes,” he says, in the end, under his breath, “yes, yes, of course I recognised you.”

The logical conclusion is one he does not pursue. He only hopes it does not happen again.

 

*

 

It’s on a dusty French road that he catches the temporal intruder and finds the answer to this particular riddle – a traveller out of time and place, only half concealed behind the bushes, as if a part of him wants to be found.

He nearly passes the stranger by, his thoughts centred on his lost companions, and the journey ahead. Then he looks again, and he recognises himself. 

He feels the shock of it: the knowledge of mortality and the strangest immortality both, though he denies it fiercely. (Look at him, that coat, those ears, most undignified, he would never! And as for what echoes in his mind, what he glimpses in his other self’s eyes – no, never, he would _never_ –!)

It’s a momentous meeting, this younger-older self and him – the older-younger self (the one true article) – but all the other does is look abashed, and say: “Whoops. My mistake. You weren’t supposed to see me.”

“You shouldn’t be here!” he protests. Then he worries as to why this has happened. He can’t see yet, but he can feel the darkness the other carries. “We mustn’t meddle – mustn’t change anything –” He’s frightened, and his fears spill out into the open this once – he can hardly hide from himself. “I shouldn’t have left, you think? Not taken Susan at least – the Ship - But I had to! We had to.”

His future self gives him an odd look, both startled and wary, and only shakes his head.

“Those teachers,” he says, still routed in the now. Those humans – Ian, Barbara. That’s a new fear – fear of losing them – and he’s experiencing it for the second time in as many days. His other self could whisk in, take them back to safety, put the timeline right. He never should have stolen them away, he knows that, but he is unexpectedly dismayed at the idea of losing them. “You want to take them home?”

“Nah,” his future self says and moves forward. “Don’t meddle with the past – can’t rewrite history, not one line. Right? Wouldn’t dream of it. Look, you won’t remember this – can’t, not before the first time, the first regeneration, I mean –”

“My memory is perfectly sound, thank you!” It’s mere surface nonsense, like his younger-older self’s greeting. He worries; he fears the future, that this great spirit of adventure is only a petty error after all.

They touch as they close together. Not physically, but in the mind. The older man reaches out to the younger man. There’s nothing any bystander could see, but between them there’s an invisible yet tangible universe of terrors, of joys and love and hate and wonder, and at the last an end in blood and fire and darkness. But it’s not the end, that’s the worst of it.

“I interfered,” one of them says aloud, and there’s an answer between them: _Always do what you’re best at._

“Right or wrong,” he says, and it is him now, his first (proper, only) self, speaking with the surety and arrogance of youth, “are irrelevant. Not when you have no choice, when you do what you have to.”

“Not that simple,” says his future self.

That’s true, of course, and yet the other truth is that the universe remains, and his friends are waiting, Susan is waiting. They’re all alive, here, now, present, past, future. There couldn’t be any other choice. And he’s seen more now, he has a moment of illumination: it’s not ‘the humans’, that’s the wrong way to think of them. It’s Ian, it’s Barbara, it’s Susan, it’s the Ship. They are his fellow travellers; other eyes with which to view the universe and see new meaning in it. Nothing in the cosmos could be worth more; there is no other pilot light to bring him into harbour.

It’s not a moment either of them can keep in their minds, though, not in these times and places, but it will not leave their hearts.

And when the ghost of his future has gone, and the incident passes from him, he shakes himself, and heads back on along the road. He wonders about his sudden headache, and if it’s due to the heat, but most of all his thoughts are full of Ian and Barbara and Susan: the purpose of his journey.

 

*

 

When it happens – the first change, the first death – he casts aside the old with gleeful abandon and embraces the new in eager anticipation of what will come. And why not? (After all, can a butterfly re-enter a chrysalis after it’s emerged, and why ever should it want to?)

But there’s a moment; a ghost he sees in the mirror, and a flash of the old sharpness, the old arrogance, and so even as he packs away the memories to sleep in his mind, he searches out that ring of his from where it’s fallen and places it carefully in a box, where it can be found again at need, like an old friend. 

 

*

 

_For there is power in the ordinary, power in the old._


End file.
